Ryutin Platform

Formation

The "Ryutin Platform" refers to two documents written in 1932: an "Appeal to All Members of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)," a short statement of program, and a much longer manuscript, "Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship," whose typescript runs to over 160 and nearly 200 pages and is commonly known as "Ryutin's Platform" ([P8], [P111]).

Martemyan Ryutin wrote the texts. He had been expelled from the party in October 1930 for "treacherously double-dealing behavior and an attempt at underground propaganda of right-opportunist views," arrested in November 1930, and released in January 1931 for lack of evidence; he was working as an economist when the documents were drafted. Those who commissioned him were Bolsheviks with pre-revolutionary party standing who knew him as an already-notorious critic of Stalin and asked him to write their program ([P17], [P62], [P109], [P111]).

On 21 August 1932 an organizational meeting near Moscow proclaimed the "Union of Marxist-Leninists." Fourteen communists from Moscow and Kharkov attended and elected a committee of Kayurov, Ivanov, Galkin, Demidov and Fedorov; Ryutin himself was not a party member. According to I. A. Anfertiev, the group had no charter, no program and no membership cards, and was arrested while its programmatic documents were still being prepared ([P112], [P124]).

Content

The Platform opened from Marx's notion of historical accident, including the character of leaders who stand at the head of a movement, and argued that under the proletarian dictatorship such an accident had become fateful. Re-reading Lenin's characterization of Stalin in his "Testament," the authors noted that Stalin normally reduced the whole matter to his own rudeness, diverting attention from his disloyalty and his intolerance of other opinions. Stalin's ascent was likened to Louis Bonaparte's 18th Brumaire, and he was defined as a dictator who rested on the party and state apparatus and the police rather than a genuine popular leader ([P140], [P141], [P142], [P145], [P146]).

On the economy and the countryside the Platform called Stalin's "theory" of inevitably intensifying class struggle a distortion of Marxism and argued that the slogan of liquidating the kulaks as a class in practice struck the middle and poor peasants. It cited figures of 30-35 percent of the rural population dekulakized in some districts by early 1932 and at least 40-50 percent of the whole rural population subjected to some form of repression between 1928 and 1932. It charged Stalin with reducing "liquidation" to total expropriation and physical extermination, and demanded an end to forced collectivization ("peace with the peasants"), voluntary collectivization, support for individual poor and middle peasant farms, a slowdown of industrialization, and an end to requisitions and cut-price grain exports ([P153], [P177], [P179], [P219], [P220]).

Politically the Platform held that removing Stalin by normal democratic means was impossible. Since the Party Rules and the Soviet Constitution offered no guarantee that the ruling clique would surrender its usurped rights, it concluded that the clique "must be removed by force." Its positive program therefore proposed an emergency party congress, replacement of the party apparatus leadership, new elections of party bodies on the basis of inner-party democracy, new Soviet elections with appointed officials decisively removed, the introduction of revolutionary legality, and a thorough purge of the GPU apparatus. It also acknowledged that such a turn carried the risk of activating forces hostile to Soviet power ([P212], [P216], [P219]).

The shorter Appeal was more inflammatory. It called Stalin "the evil genius of the Party and the revolution," argued that he "must be removed by force," and urged readers to organize cells of the Union under the banner of Leninism for the liquidation of the Stalin dictatorship. The Platform's assessments of Trotsky and Trotskyism, and of Bukharin, are internally contradictory: it held the economic program of the 1920s left opposition to be wrong while conceding that on the inner-party regime and Stalin's role "Trotsky and the Trotskyists turned out to be mainly right." V. Rogovin read such passages as the product of a political compromise among different anti-Stalin groups, and O. Khlevniuk notes that whether the copies surviving in the archives match Ryutin's original text is disputed ([P9], [P113], [P162], [P183], [P184]).

Distribution and suppression

In the summer and early autumn of 1932 the Appeal was distributed to workers and to opposition-minded party members. Bukharin's former comrades, the "Red Professors" Slepkov, Maretsky and Sten, helped distribute the manuscripts; Sten passed copies to Zinoviev and Kamenev, while Slepkov gave them to Trotskyists in Kharkov. Former Right Opposition leaders Tomsky, Uglanov and Rykov also saw the Appeal, and Kayurov aligned himself with the group ([P9], [P111]).

On 14 September 1932 two party members informed the Central Committee about the Appeal; five members were arrested the next day, and nineteen more soon after. Of the twenty-four arrested, eight were former Rights, three Zinovievists and three little-known Trotskyists; Zinoviev, Kamenev and Sten, who had read the documents, were also arrested ([P67], [P121]).

The sources disagree on how far the circle of readers extended. The Russian Wikipedia article on the Union of Marxist-Leninists describes the twenty-four arrested as members of the Union, while the article on Ryutin describes the organization as small and, following Anfertiev, still at the preparatory stage without a program. Both accounts agree, however, that the OGPU arrested a wide circle of people connected with the affair ([P67], [P121], [P124]).

On 27 September 1932 the Presidium of the Central Control Commission, with twenty-four participants including Rudzutak, Yaroslavsky, Yenukidze, Soltz and Lenin's sister Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova, took up the Ryutin group and authorized the OGPU to uncover its still undetected members and to apply "the entire strictness of revolutionary law" to "these White Guard criminals." The Presidium's final report of 9 October expelled twenty-four people and banished them from Moscow; the members were described as forming an underground bourgeois-kulak organization under a false "Marxist-Leninist" banner in order to restore capitalism and kulakdom ([P10], [P123]).

Ryutin's own fate went to the ruling Politburo. Stalin demanded the death penalty in September 1932; the Politburo, against his insistence, secured the annulment of that sentence for a time, and, fearing publicity, Stalin declined to stage a show trial. On 11 October 1932 the OGPU collegium sentenced Ryutin to ten years' imprisonment and his comrades to terms of five to ten years. Held in the Suzdal and then the Verkhneuralsk political isolator, he was brought back to Moscow in 1936 and shot on 10 January 1937, the day he was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium ([P51], [P71], [P73], [P75]).

Historical significance and assessment

At the 17th Party Congress in 1934 the office of General Secretary was abolished altogether. According to the Russian researcher A. I. Fursov, the Ryutin affair marked the point from which every opponent of Stalin was automatically treated as a counterrevolutionary and expulsion from the party was routinely followed by arrest and extrajudicial punishment. The affair is generally assessed as the last organized attempt to oppose Stalin inside the party and as marking the general decline of the Right Opposition ([P3], [P47]).

The most enduring dispute concerns the story that the Politburo blocked Stalin's demand for execution. Many historians, led by Robert Conquest, accept the account first advanced in 1936 by Boris Nicolaevsky's "Letter of an Old Bolshevik": Kirov spoke with particular force against the death penalty, joined to varying degrees by Ordzhonikidze, Kuibyshev, Kosior and Rudzutak, while only Kaganovich backed Stalin. J. Arch Getty calls this a "persistent myth" and points to an earlier case in which the Politburo voted a harsh penalty and Stalin moderated it. No stenographic record of the meeting has been found, so how far Stalin actually pressed for execution cannot be settled from the surviving sources ([P12]).

Interpretations also differ on the group's size and preparation. Anfertiev judged that the attempt to unite opponents of the General Secretary had no prospects under the conditions of the time, that the participants were arrested before constituting an organization while still preparing programmatic documents, and that they belonged to no anti-Soviet or terrorist center. Pierre Broué theorized that the Ryutin group belonged to a larger anti-Stalin bloc formed in 1932 that included Trotsky and Smirnov. The membership of any such bloc is not documented in the available sources ([P13], [P124]).

The affair did not end with Ryutin. Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had read the Platform and failed to report it to the secret police, were expelled in October 1932 and exiled to the Urals. Ryutin was not rehabilitated despite his surviving daughter's petitions of 1956 and 1958; full rehabilitation and restoration to the party came only in 1988 ([P13], [P79], [P80]).